Sinful Sunday: Celebrating Lena and Simone, the Queer Southern Gothic Villains of "Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island"
Lena and Simone are the epitome of dangerous cat ladies, highlighting the deep connection between the Southern Gothic and queerness.
Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!
Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
There’s a very good reason that Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is widely regarded as one of the best films to star the titular Great Dane and his human companions. In this case, the monsters–the zombies of the title–are actually real and, while this wasn’t the first time that had been the case in the Scoobyverse, the film was notable for its darker tone and quasi-realistic aesthetics. Once you’ve seen these zombies, you’re not likely to forget them.
While the zombies might at first seem to be the antagonists, it eventually becomes clear that they are actually the good guys or, at the very least, that they’re trying to warn Scooby and company away from Moonscar Island so as to avoid what happened to them. For, you see, they all had their life forces drained by Lena and Simone, the two caretakers of the island, the former a dark-haired seductress and the latter a domineering woman with a seductive (though dubious) French accent, both of whom transform into malicious cat creatures during the Harvest Moon. To me, these characters are two of the most compelling, and queerest, baddies Scooby and the gang have ever faced.
At first glance, it might seem like a bit of a stretch to claim that Lena Simone are predatory lesbians. However, the more one thinks about it, and the closer one looks at the way in which these characters are portrayed, it’s easy to see how they fit very nicely into the long history of such characters. They may not necessarily be lovers, but in all of the ways that matter they are nevertheless very queer cats indeed, and this makes them even more fascinating and terrifying than your standard Scooby villain. (Though I do think it’s worth pointing out that they are very much a butch/femme type couple, with some intergenerational mixing thrown in there for good measure).
To begin with, there’s the fact that the film takes place in the sinister swamps of Louisiana. Indeed, of all of the various productions involving Scooby-Doo, this is the one that has the closest and deepest engagement with the conventions of the Southern Gothic tradition which, in turn, has always been quite queer in its own right. As Tyler Christensen puts it, “Countless signposts of Gothic Literature are in lock-step with the queer experience, making the metaphors both simple and poignant,” from the “murky waters” of the swamp to sprawling antebellum mansions, with all of their associations of ghosts and hauntings and unrequited, seething desires. Zombie Island puts all of these to good use, immersing the viewer and the gang in a sinister world filled with pirate histories, bloodshed, and curses.
And then there’s the cat connection.
By now we all know that there seems to be a strong bond between unruly femininity and felines (witness J.D. Vance’s much-maligned comments about how the Democratic Party is comprised of a bunch of childless cat ladies). This much is clear from the moment that Scooby and the gang arrive on Moonscar Island, where they’re greeted by the seductive, deep voiced Simone (voiced by the inimitable Adrienne Barbeau, who is clearly having the time of her life). In addition to having a house full of cats, she expresses profound and venomous contempt for Scooby–a recurring joke is that he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s a dog–and, as will soon be revealed, she has a similar disgust for Daphne and for the trappings of the modern world.
If Simone’s relentless bitchery and contempt for the hoi polloi don’t qualify her for Motherhood and gay iconicity, then I don’t know what could. Lena may not be quite as compelling a presence as Simone, but there’s also something a little queer about the way that she acts as bait for Freddie and the rest of the gang. Tara Carendoff imbues the character with a sinister and slightly-too-intense sort of sweetness, suggesting the true rottenness beneath.
Zombie Island takes the dangerous cat lady convention to its furthest extreme by having these two women be the last survivors of a group of colonists who worshiped their cat god in some nebulously-defined period of the past, before they were all slaughtered by the pirate Morgan Moonscar and his minions. Simone and Lena survived while their friends and family were chased into the swamp to be devoured by alligators and, after calling down a curse from their cat god, they become werecats that require draining life from others in order to survive. (I’ve always wondered just where these people came from, since it’s pretty clear that they’re not ancient Egyptians, but this is just one of those things that you have to be willing to go along with when it comes to movies like this one).
As the film reaches its climax it becomes clear that Lena and Simone–and the ferryman Jacques, who joined their ranks because he yearned for immortality–have lost anything even remotely resembling their former innocence and humanity. What began as a pursuit for justice has instead become a never ending search for nourishment, one that seems to contain more than a little malice (witness Simone’s taunting Daphne for being pretty smart, “for a television reporter.”) Then again, who amongst us wouldn’t bear a grudge against the world if we were cursed to be cat creatures for all of eternity, all because a bunch of pirates decided to slaughter a group of colonists?
This all reaches its apotheosis when Lena and Simone begin their grisly transformation into their true forms, first by adopting features that are distinctly feline and then going full-on cat monster. Just as there has long been an association between unruly femininity and felines, so there is also a connection between were-creatures and queerness. It’s there in films like the original Cat People, and it’s also there in the many ways that transformation narratives often resonate with queer viewers, many of whom have often felt as if there were a part of them that was yearning for release, even if that happened to mean that they would also be monstrous.
To add to the queerness of it all, these cat creatures are, like many other monsters, beasts of relentless appetite, dependent on their consumption of the souls of others in order to continue living. Lena and Simone–and, to a lesser extent, the ferryman Jacques–are childless, destructive beings of embodied appetite, just as so many other queer monsters have been throughout history. Small wonder that we queers can’t help but be drawn to and repelled by them at the same time; there but for the grace of God, as the saying goes. At the same time, there is also something inescapably tragic about Lena and Simone. For all that we might find their actions and in fact their very existence repugnant, it’s not as if they asked for their lives to be disrupted and turned upside down. Moonscar had it coming, even if their other victims didn’t.
Of course, this is Scooby-Doo that we’re talking about here, so it’s not as if these villains are going to escape the punishment that’s always meted out to those who cause so much damage. They end up being the victim of their own hubris, their soul-sucking ceremony disrupted to such a degree that the hour passes, and they turn to dust, consigned to the oblivion they have so long sought to avoid.
Even though they perish, however, Lena and Simone set up a standard that has never quite been met by any of the villains that followed in their footsteps. The closest would probably be Sarah Ravencroft, the malicious witch from Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost, but even she lacks the queer bite of her predecessors. In the end, Lena and Simone are, like so many other Southern Gothic figures, reminders of a grim and terrible past risen up to haunt the present. They might be gone, but they are certainly never forgotten.